crying roy orbison 010805 ... xxan? all day long 010806 ... kinkazoid the other day i cried so hard that i couldnt open my eyes all the way afterwards, and they were all puffy and they hurt. i was crying becuze i work at a grocery store and peopel that day were being so mean they kept yelling at me for things that werent my fault and then a manager that i was friends with yelled at me for joking around im sensative and couldnt cry all day at work so went to my boyfriends house and balled about it. then he got mad and yelled at me cuz i didnt say why i was crying, i couldnt talk cuz i was crying so hard and him getting mad and yelling at me for that just made me cry even more. :( 010806 ... psychobabe ahhh i hate crying especially if its in front of my friends cuz then i think i'm letting them down for some odd reason. Like crying is a sign of weakness, but then they tell me its alright and its ok. i guess i have true friends :) 011121 ... silentbob if they were truly your friends they would beat you til you stopped crying. til they made you a rock. 011121 ... Sonya Until I'm completely dry inside. I feel like her in that song you love so much yet it hurts you to listen. Crying out in a pain that wrenches and writhes...unrelenting, unyielding. I'd give anything now just to smile again. Someone make me smile, please? Oh well...I'd even settle for a smirk instead. 020625 ... chaotic.simplicity you want to smile? ahemmmm. my attempt at humor. did you hear about the new pirate movie?? it's rated ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR! are you smiling yet? 020626 ... Sonya That was cute. Thank you. :) 020627 ... apoeticmisfit sometimes i wish my tears could fall into words...so then i wouldn't have to try and make sense of them in pen. i wouldn't have to try and find what i was feeling in letters and on paper...it would jsut fall out. 020711 ... blown cherry exhausts me right through and mercifully sends sleep to my side 021104 ... blue star for the past week I've woken up either crying or with a face swollen from crying. And nobody gives a damn. I can't even bring myself to care. 040428 ... from now on yes 041022 ... skyburst777 today i surprised myself 050602 ... Lemon_Soda Not very often...but when I do it feels good and better when I stop. 050603 ... thorn I have been crying myself to sleep for the past week. When I tried to talk to you, you just said that you were moving soon. We're falling apart. You have a girlfriend, and you're moving soon. I'm pushing you out to feel like I can control something, so I won't get hurt when you leave. I make things hard for myself. 051113 ... nom i don't cry anymore 051113 ... nom of course i do 051113 ... nom listening to the morning 060419 ... nom he doesn't even like me he likes someone else i shouldn't have read 060815 ... cb broke down, emotionaly. looking for a jack and my spare, only found it broken and flat, so i went to the bathroom. i staired at myself. i sized him up. the guy in the mirror. i cut free. i broke out. i left my trouble in the trash can and then hit the road again, knowing exactly what to expect and not knowing what to do about it. i cried and i cried and i cried and i'll cry again. 061210 ... nom crying is stupid 061219 ... tender_square all i wanted was to do was shed some tears alone as i made lunch yesterday, just a quick, private cry. but michael was hanging around the kitchen drinking coffee and eating ravioli, which he doesn’t usually do. “is everything okay?” he asked. he could feel that my energy was off. “i was writing about some heavy stuff today, old relationships that i’m seeing from a new angle.” the tears fell as i sliced cucumbers at the counter. he was standing in the hallway, away from me, on his way back upstairs to his office. “maybe you shouldn’t be writing about this stuff,” he suggested. “no, i need to be writing about it; i need to release myself of things i’ve been holding onto for too long.” the tears came with greater force and i dabbed at my eyes with my hoodie sleeves. “look, i’m not trying to put any of this on you; i wanted to process this alone, but you were in the room and i can’t hold it in anymore.” michael made no move to close the distance between us. “i’m finding more compassion for myself than i used to have; there are things i’ve done with men that i didn’t want to do.” “well, you know that’s not on them, right?” he was so quick with this comment, it seemed stony then and still feels stony now. “i never said it was,” i clarified. “but there’s one situation i haven’t written about yet that violated me more than i previously realized. i’m not saying it was…you know…but i didn’t want to have sex with him again and it happened so quickly i couldn’t even process what was happening.” he remained standing in the hallway, five feet away from me. i stopped preparing my salad and turned to him. “can i have a hug?” michael moved toward me, reluctantly, holding onto his coffee mug in one hand as he reached for me. “can we put this down?” i took the mug from his hands and placed it on the counter. “i need a real hug.” he’s never half-hugged me before. he wrapped his arms around me and we stood there embracing. i sobbed for a few seconds. “what’s *wrong?*” why is he so bothered by any sadness i show? is this why i’m trying to be so tough, for his benefit? “i just really needed a hug,” i said, releasing him. “i’m grieving like dr. alice said to; i’m realizing it’s not right for me to act like i’m so strong all the time—look at what’s happened with my mom.” i have never seen or heard my mother cry until covid started, when all the shit popped off with my older sisters and she became estranged from her own sister, rena, in the process. mom’s therapist said to her, “the problem with looking so capable all the time is that no one’s there for you when you need help the most.” “no, you’re right,” he said. “it’s a good thing to let that go.” michael continued talking with me for a few minutes as i ate at the coffee table. “it just never ends, all the stuff we’re dealing with. when does it get better?” i know he’s exasperated but we don’t get to choose when these things happen to us. he keeps waiting for life to get better and i keep telling him “this *is* life.” near the end of our walk this morning, i asked him directly, “why did i have to ask you for a hug in that moment when i needed you?” “i’m just so averse to what’s going on right now; it never stops.” he’s so weary anymore. “i understand that, but i feel like i’m pouring my heart out to you and you won’t meet me there.” “i don’t like dwelling on the past; we have enough that we’re dealing with in the present.” “yes, but when you do that, it feels like you’re putting a wall between us. you feel emotionally withdrawn from me.” “everything is just so unsettled and i’m tired of it feeling that way,” he said as we crested the hill out of the park. “you mean with the windsor stuff?” “yeah, it’s been unsettled for a long time and that’s really frustrating.” he hasn’t felt at home anywhere since we left ann arbor in the summer of 2019; he often refers to the period before i got into grad school as being this golden point in our lives that he’s trying to get back to. my therapist wonders if this notion of home is something michael is always chasing; his parents divorced when he was young and he lived in two different states for several years; he lost his home in katrina; his mother has died. before there was talk of windsor, there was talk of moving to chicago, there was talk of relocating to new buffalo; there was talk of other places in ontario for a phd program. There’s always been this rootless feeling in him. “i know, but it’s going to be unsettled for the foreseeable future; i don’t know when that ends,” i said. “great!” he snapped. “look, i’m not saying that to upset you; it’s the reality of the situation. it’s going to take a few years to get there.” as we walked to the car he said, “i don’t believe that the purpose of creativity is for catharsis. the way to move away from the past is to create something new and novel. maybe this is a poet thing.” i have no idea what that means; he couldn’t really elaborate on it when i asked him to. he said something about people at open mics and i disagreed and so we decided to drop it. “whenever you bring up the past, it reminds me of david,” he said. “though not to the same degree, more like 5%.” “the jungians say when we’re confronting our shadow, that this is often connected to our childhood,” i offered. “yeah, but that’s not always the case.” 211013 ... unhinged this poet musician painter does it ALL for the catharsis life is uncertainty. expecting anything different is what keeps the wheel of samsara turning. sometimes i cry - chris stapleton i miss my dad so much right now. usually eating out alone doesn't bother me. but today i am crying in my beer. 211013 ... unhinged on the bus the tears well but my bottom eyelashes defiantly hold them in the way my father hugged me when i hyperventilated as a child my eyes take back the moisture my nose starts to run instead hidden behind my mask 211025 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Me too today, but for a stupid reason: I wanted to finish copying a rough copy of my last question for a homework assignment, and the prof said just to rip out the notebook paper the rough copy was written on. I didn't; it was barely intelligible and the whole process of circling the relevant material and attaching it somehow to my other sheet seemed too complicated. So she said the main thing was not to do stuff at the last minute. That made me think of how I wasn't good at that in general, which made me tear up by the time I sat back down. But she had no idea it was a sore spot, so it's silly to blame her. I can cry and not be weak. I can bend and not break. I can quote half-remembered choir songs and not disintegrate into quantum uncertainty. Yet. 211025 ... kerry weeping in the airport after a humiliating and unnecessary pat-down. hardcore sobbing in a bathroom stall on the phone with my dad telling him about it. calling my father is a kneejerk reaction. someone is in the stall next to me. caring less and less about who sees/hears. 211026 ... nr i've been through this too, kerry (see: immigration). "humiliating" is the best word for it. 211026 ... nr also i wish i could cry more logically 211026 ... e_o_i The above sentence: I laughed because I FEEL that. About airport security overreaches: it was 2005, I was going to Newfoundland with the youth choir, and one of the youngest choristers had brought a small orange juice bottle she'd refilled with water. Security guy had her take a sip before he'd let her board with it. Not invasive, but a bit ridiculous: what kind of terrorism did he think a twelve-year-old kid was up to? But sometimes you aren't allowed to bring liquids on airplanes at all. Anyway. I don't like being touched by strangers either. And not for any particular reason; it just makes me annoyed/uncomfortable. Which isn't necessarily a good thing: there was a summer-camp staff training thing where my group had to get all its members through a web of ropes without anyone talking, and since I was small they lifted me up. Unprepared, I blurted "Stop touching me!" so we had to start the exercise all over again. 220219 ... e_o_i Oh yes. Crying. I was listening to CBC radio as I made lentil soup and there was an interview with the author of Five Little Indians. Interviewer was asking her (Michelle Good is her name) what inspired her to write this book - you know, routine stuff - and she said how she never forgot about her mother telling her about how she saw another kid die coughing blood in the schoolyard. Was it like that? It was something sad and gruesome anyway. The other kid had TB; they were at one of the so-called residential schools, where children were routinely neglected and abused. I was wiping off the surface of the oven and my ears teared up. This made me annoyed, and I thought, "You can't cry at everything." I was thinking of my own mental equilibrium. But also - and I'm not sure how to phrase this - it seems almost disrespectful to cry over other people's grief sometimes. As if I'm trying to take it over, when it has little to do with me. C.f. a_morbid_sense_of_powerpoints, my mom thinking I was being compassionate when I cried about murdered children. I don't know what I was being. In the moment it felt natural and inevitable, but afterwards I wondered if it wasn't selfish, unloading my mundane sadness about onto something worse, just to feel something outside of myself. But I think it makes sense to cry, as long as I acknowledge that people closer to the problem (in the case of residential schools, something shockingly recent) need more space for their grief. As long as I don't intrude on that. And as long as I remember: Having the impulse to cry at something bad doesn't make me a *better* person, just as laughing at the incongruity between tragedy and ordinary life doesn't make me a *worse* person. I'm thinking of my argument with my parents on Monday. But it was bad of me to anger my parents just because I felt bad. That was the wrong part, the deliberateness, the idea that if I feel bad, they have to feel bad too. 220219 ... kerry e_o_i: i can relate to so much of this. laughing at "inappropriate" times, it's more like an expression of disbelief, for me anyway. and i agree with all that about crying for other people without intruding. and sometimes crying is an impulse--when i see someone cry i cry too. not necessarily because i understand it or sympathize. it's contagious, like yawning. 220220 ... e_o_i It is!! I was wasting time last week watching someone on YouTube react to Saving Private Ryan (they showed only parts of the whole movie) and when she cried, I cried too. And I didn't cry when I first saw the movie. Okay, I was unprepared for the violence, because I had this idea that my friend who recommended it had a low tolerance for movie violence, and I didn't exactly *enjoy* it (also it's pretty good but I think Empire of the Sun is better!) but anyway I didn't cry then. I also cried when I reread parts of Anne_of_Green_Gables. Not because they were sad. Just because of nostalgia...which is a bit silly, but that's where I sort of enjoy crying. I am a sappy sap of sappiness at times. 220223 ... kerry i just reread anne of avonlea and i got a bit misty-eyed too!!! i felt silly but now i feel slightly less silly. it’s just such gorgeous fucking writing and i had no idea when i was a kid how good it was. they don’t feel like children’s books to me. i’m about to dive into LM montgomery’s journals—another anne-fan highly recommended them. 220224 ... tender_square brea called dad to wish him a happy father's day on her birthday. i got back to the house as he was letting her go. later, he mentioned that brea had been crying. "she was upset that everyone had forgotten her birthday," he said. mom had texted her earlier in the day, only to receive a passive-aggressive response about the message not being a phone call. "what does brea expect?" i said. "i sent her a card in the mail at the same time i sent one to candi for her birthday, and i know candi got hers. terri didn't call because she's in the hospital." 230618 what's it to you? who go blather from